The World Around Us
We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.
M. E. Rothwell • All Hail the Cloud
Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs.1 The world contains 40,000 lions compared to 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 billion domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.
Yuval Noah Harari • Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Our photographs are not memories; they are advertisements, billboards for a life we are too preoccupied to live.
M. E. Rothwell • All Hail the Cloud
After all, not to be corny, haven’t we all become selective autobiographers in the digital age as we curate our lives for our own audiences of any size—cutting away from the raw fabric of our lived experience to reveal the shape of the story we most want to tell, whether it’s on our own feeds or the world’s stage?
TIME's Person of the Year 2023
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes • The Sense of an Ending
AI could consume up to 3.5% of the world’s electricity by 2030, according to an estimate from IT research and consulting firm Gartner.
Belle Lin • How Did Companies Use Generative AI in 2023? Here’s a Look at Five Early Adopters - WSJ
We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.